Sharethrough now enables importing publisher content automatically into native ads

Sharethrough is providing advertisers and publishers more options to leverage native advertising online. The company is announcing the launch of Continuous Campaigns, a way for advertisers to automatically import creative to their placements to create more dynamic campaigns on publisher sites.

Debuting at Sharethrough’s fifth NATIVE Summit in San Francisco, Continuous Campaigns is the company’s latest effort to convince publishers of the potential for native advertising. Forbes is the inaugural launch partner, but Sharethrough said this offering is now open to everyone.

Sharethrough has also opened up its Content Cards feature.

Dynamic content with Continuous Campaigns

Available through Sharethrough for Publisher, Continuous Campaigns gives brands the ability to build “large, sponsored content libraries” through publishers’ sites. Advertisers can integrate an entire feed of sponsored content (Instagram, tweets, Pinterest pins, blog posts, RSS feeds, etc.) into Continuous Campaigns, automatically turning it into in-feed native ads.

“One thing that we’re seeing is advertisers creating all this cool content,” said Sharethrough CEO Dan Greenberg. “Go to any major brand and there’s content everywhere. Their goal is to get this stuff in front of users, but how do you do it in a scalable way? Continuous Campaigns lets them distribute feeds of content so that ads can be refreshing.”

Through a dashboard, advertisers can purchase placement on a publisher’s site and, using Continuous Campaigns, select which feeds they’d like featured. By front-loading content into Sharethrough, advertisers will not have to rely on creative campaign and worry about having to constantly log in to craft the message — Continuous Campaigns will pull in content automatically so advertisers can post targeted messages onto the blog or social media account.

Greenberg told VentureBeat that the use of an algorithm will also allow Sharethrough to surface the most engaged piece of content more frequently to drive audience engagement. “It’s about throwing a handful of darts at a site and optimizing around the ones closest to the bullseye,” he said.

“Our publishers have built massive sponsored content programs that are becoming harder to manage without updated technology,” said Curt Larson, the company’s vice president of product. “Continuous Campaigns was built to help brands and publishers find the best, freshest gems among all the diverse content being produced and reduce the complexity of transitioning from creation to promotion.”

Sharethrough isn’t charging customers anything extra to use Continuous Campaigns, which is being offered as a value-added solution built into its Sharethrough for Publishers program.

Content Cards for all

In addition, Sharethrough has announced that it is opening up its Content Cards to publishers, who can now resell the offering through Sharethrough’s platform. Starting today, publishers can create and sell this ad placement option directly to advertisers.

Launched in December, Content Cards is a form of native advertising that provides interactivity and media to ads in a card format. It could also be called “Native Cards,” and it seems similar to Facebook’s Advertising Network and Instant Articles, Carousel Ads on Instagram and Twitter, and Google AdWords.

Greenberg said that Cards are about user experience: “It’s about speed, being mobile friendly, clean, crisp, and easy. Facebook’s Instant Articles is like this. The mobile web sucks, so the launch of Cards is an equivalent strategy for the rest of the world. If you’re a modern publisher and want your content to be light, friendly, etc, it can live on mobile via Content Cards.”

Today, advertisers and publishers can create an infinite number of Card types, pull from a New York Times article, re-promote a VentureBeat story (hint hint), build swipeable image cards like Instagram, and craft cards that support videos, infographics, photo galleries, and more.

Since its debut more than six months ago, Sharethrough said that it has seen more than 50 brands use Content Cards to distribute “thousands of pieces of content.” Publishers that have used the program through Sharethrough Exchange include Men’s Health, Time Inc., Flixster, Forbes, People, and hundreds of others.